The amount of digital data made available for analysis has grown along with the growth of computing technology and communication infrastructure. Unfortunately vast mountains of data remain unused or unviewed. Great discoveries remain hidden within such datasets.
Traditional AI techniques used to analyze data merely seek to find correlations among existing data sets. Although useful in establishing possible patterns, a person is still required to reason or infer the meaning behind the patterns. Better techniques would allow a computing infrastructure to reason or infer possible relationships among aspects of a data set and then allow for automated validation of such inferences.
Others have applied varying reasoning techniques for scientific purposes as described in the paper titled “The Automation of Science”, King et al., Science 3 Apr. 2009: Vol. 324 no. 5923 pp. 85-89. King's disclosed robot successfully applied reasoning techniques to make several new discoveries.
Known techniques focus on deriving facts that can be used for other purposes. For example, European patent application publication 1 672 535 to Staron et al. titled “Distributed intelligent diagnostic scheme” file Dec. 8, 2005, describes using reasoning techniques to diagnose network issues. Further, U.S. Pat. No. 5,706,406 to Pollock titled “Architecture for an Artificial Agent that Reasons Defeasibly”, filed May 22, 1995, describes reasoning that can be used to control robots, assembly lines, or as an adviser for medical diagnosis. Another example includes U.S. Pat. No. 7,003,433 to Yemini et al. titled “Apparatus and Method for Event Correlation and Problem Reporting”, filed Jan. 12, 2005. Yemini describes mapping symptoms to problems through matrix-based reasoning techniques.
Others have attempted to provide inference services. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,191,163 to Herrera et al. titled “System and Method for Providing Inference Services”, filed Apr. 18, 2003, describes inference services with respect to specified domains. Another example includes U.S. Pat. No. 7,447,667 to Gong et al. titled “Method and Knowledge Structures for Reasoning about Concepts Relations, and Rules”, filed Dec. 11, 2002. Still further, U.S. patent application publication 2006/0168195 to Maturana et al. titled “Distributed Intelligent Diagnostic Scheme”, filed Dec. 15, 2006, describes using inference based on logical reasoning to diagnose or reconfigure a system. Yet another example includes U.S. patent application publication 2007/0136222 to Horvitz titled “Question and Answer Architecture for Reasoning and Clarifying Intentions, Goals, and Needs from Contextual Clues and Content”, filed Dec. 9, 2005. Still another example includes U.S. patent application publication 2011/0153362 to Valin et al. titled “Method and Mechanism for Identifying Protecting, Requesting, Assisting and Managing Information”, filed Dec. 17, 2009.
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It has yet to be appreciated that inference or reasoning techniques can be applied to a general computing infrastructure where the infrastructure itself can function as a reasoning engine based on collected ambient data. Further, the known approaches fail to appreciate the value of providing multiple possible reasoning approaches in response to an inquiry or altering the environment to seek validation of a possible conclusion reached via the reasoning approaches.
Thus, there is still a need for reasoning engines.